Kierkegaard and the Concept of Irony: Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical

Abstract

In recent years, studies on irony have gained renewed interest in kierkegaardian studies. In addition to being linked to a strategy of indirect communication, irony –characterized by contradiction– is approached by the danish philosopher as an existential position bordering the aesthetic and ethical spheres. This paper explores the relationship between the notion of irony elaborated by Søren Kierkegaard in his 1841 thesis and that irony presented in his pseudonymous writings as a confinium or border region, that makes possible the leaps of subjective development. It is argued here that the contrast established between socratic and romantic irony has its correlate in the dialectic between aesthete A and judge Wilhelm presented in Either/or. The analysis of this contrast from the point of view of the Postcriptum helps to clarify the figure of the ironist, highlighting the important role of the imagination and the anchoring that it must have in concrete historical reality, in order to glimpse the possibility of an existence in the ethical sphere.